Exalted: Out Of The Eater

"Because they- because it's," you reach for something and it isn't there. You try to give it shape and trust to your instincts or the momentum of the moment or this second of precious clarity, of raw vulnerability to carry you forward only to find that...they can't. That it's not enough. That you've seized up anyway, that you're paralyzed; your brain silently suffocating on a dozen things you cannot say, strangling itself to try to spare you the humiliation.

"B-b-because I-"

You had an idea, you think. There was something you wanted to try to make him understand. Like there was a shape emerging from the mists, blurry details resolving and reconciling into a single structure, a sculpted edifice, and you wanted to show it to him. Describe it to him so that he could see it too, so that he could know. Words that were so beautiful in your head, that were so simple and made so much sense, they're just shattered on your tongue now. The gravel spilling back down your throat, choking you. It's only the chunks that make it through; just the grit and ruined remnants of what was once a single, coherent thing.

"I-"

You fall silent.

A breaker crashes against your body, a rust-red wave striking your navel as you kneel there on the shore. The tide's rolling in: a steady, relentless drumbeat that chews away at the coast. Every surge lingering a little longer, reaching a little higher; every sucking pull out to sea a little weaker, draining away a little less. It pushes against you, brushing back the folds of your jacket and glues your tunic to the tanned skin below. It tugs at you, plucks at the corners of your coat and catches at your wrists.

The rain is falling now, gentle and cool, ashen drops striking your neck and wetting your scalp. Trickling over your temples, your throat, your slender shoulders in grey rivulets, dripping down the long strands of dark hair. Another wave comes in, slapping your stomach. It rushes out and you crook your fingers like you can hold it. Like you can claw it back. But of course you can't. All you can do is set little eddies and swirls in the red clay current. All you can do is feel it as it slips away, coursing against your skin, spilling up against your fingers.

Your scarlet stone rests against your sternum, a small lump beneath the slick cloth. There isn't a part of you that isn't soaked, that isn't steadily being stained by the storm. The purple dunes underfoot have been swallowed up completely. All around you the beach is vanishing, the low clouds in the near distance swirling above the surface of the waves. Shades like the first touch of the dawn married to fresh skinned flesh, meeting and mingling and bleeding together.

The boy gives you time, you think he knows "why" isn't a question you get a lot. You swallow the wreckage of your first attempt and try again.

"Because I want to be free," you whisper, "because I want to be free and they'd never let me. Never let any of us. We live a-and we die and they burn our bodies in village squares or dump us into open graves like we're trash. Even when we're dead we're just- we're not even human to them. We're less than animals. They'd whip a man who crippled a warhorse or beat one who hurt a favorite dog b-but a helot is just-"

Your hair hangs lank and wet, hiding your face. The sick, hitching sob is lost in the thunder above. The boy doesn't interrupt you. He just waits.

"I want it to stop," you say, not looking up at him. Eyes trained down, down on the rising surf, on your cracked and calloused hands. "I want it to stop, I just want it to stop..."

"But?" The boy asks gently, his voice soft, something of a hiss lingering in the wake of that single syllable. You slowly, achingly, lift a shaking hand to your face and push it through that feathery, spiked up mess. And you look at him, really look at him. He could have walked off the painted wall of a Speaker's Cathedral, one of those lavishly decorated ceilings and or colorful murals. A cascade of curls and licks spilling down his neck, the kind of blue so deep and rich it's nearly black. Skin that must have been like yours once-upon-a-time before it was washed out, drained into that almost slate grey. Threaded through with tendrils of pitch, channels of tar and oil and it takes you a second to realize that those are his veins not tattoos, curling up around his jaws and framing his face on either side. His laurel crown sits low on his brow and as you watch he carefully tips it back an inch, two, just to keep it from slipping over his eyes. Waterlogged robes weigh him down, the hem curling and rippling just beneath the surface of the water like an octopus's skirt. His eyes are burning things, sclera like smoke and live coals, slitted irises like a battlefield sunset. A bloody sunrise at sea.

"But...," you continue and the words come almost measured now, like you're counting them off one by one, saying things you'd thought and never dared voice aloud, "they won't let it. They can't. Without the helotry there are no citizens, freedom has no meaning if all are equal. Without the helotry there is no army, no themes, the City can't exist without slaves to work the fields and quarry stone. Without the helotry every wall will fall and they've- they've spent so long hunting us, hurting us, they can't loosen their grip now without admitting they were wrong. Without admitting that their fathers and mothers and ancestors were wrong. Without admitting they never had to do any of this."

"And so?"

"So let them fucking burn," you snarl back at him, "I don't care about their armies or their walls. I don't care about their ancestors or their archons or their Gods that killed mine. They made the price of freedom the blood of the City and thought it was a thing they'd never have to pay and maybe they're right! They have the soldiers, the sorcerers, Heaven and the Dragons and all we have is our bare hands! But you asked what I would do if I could? What I would do if Lookshy was on it's knees and I had a sword at it's throat? That's my answer: I'd kill it. I'd murder it and hack that monster to pieces and buy our freedom with its body."

The last few words ring out over the waters; you're panting, breath coming in short gasps, and he's...smiling. Head tipped to the side, with that kind of expression that pushes the eyes half-lidded and bares too many too-sharp teeth. Happiness unchecked by fear or shame.

"This is your choice Alexius," he says, "if you refuse to return you will pass on, to Lethe or to my domain I cannot say, but either way your mortal woes will end. This chapter of Creation will close and the world will drift on."

"Or?" you ask, your voice barely audible over the rumble of the waves.

"You give your name to the Dead and forever forswear it. You become of us, of this place. You become not a slave but my soldier, my vassal-knight, and I will bestow upon you a new name and grant you the power to raze the City. You become Anathema and bring ruin to those dragons who rule Lookshy and freedom to the helotry."

For a time there is silence.

You don't move, you don't blink. Your mouth is dry and your lips taste of salt, your eyes still raw from the crying. The sea foams around you, the waters cradling you close and all you can think is that it's not as cold as it should be. It's not as cold as it should be. There's a million things you should ask, a million more faithful prayers you should scream in the boy-thing's face. At this, your final hour. This, the last stand for your immortal soul as you fight for your place on the wheel of reincarnation. But instead what falls out into that quiet, that almost-hush is just: "There are so many, why me? There are so many you could choose. Why me?"

The smile slips from the boy's face and he is the one to break the stare first. Loosely clasping one hand in another, worrying, fretting and it's such a childlike thing that already you want to apologize, want to embrace him and tell him it's alright. But that's more energy than you have to give. More effort than you can muster from your exhausted body. You're scraped clean on the inside, hollowed out by everything. Instead you just exhale and look away as well.

"I...only have the one to offer," he says at last, fidgeting with his glossy, azure-laquered claws, "I have only ever had the one and it was granted to me but recently. I wanted to choose my knight right away but there is- I see them all as they die, their snapped strands of Fate curling around them. I see them all and I am unsure. I see them and I cannot choose. But I saw you as you fell and caught you because you were kind and you dreamed and you were furious and it was..."

"An impulse heh," you finish, and somehow that actually makes it better you think. There was no grand edict, no judgment from on high, no long-delayed mechanism of retribution finally lurching into effect to halt the madness, stop the massacre, to deliver them all. Just an unfathomable beast in the body of a child. Twisting himself into a knot as he tried to pick among the corpses. It's all so very-

Human.

Cursed and lost and broken and twisted and made into something monstrous and somehow still human at the end. Just like you.

Just like you.

"I will accept," you say, "If you will tell me your name."

The boy stops fretting and the smile returns, smaller this time but still sincere, still real and true for all that; shark-teeth gleaming in the half-light. The wind begins to pick up as the edges of his form boil and curl away, dissolving into streamers of color: citrus and cherry and vineyard grapes put to the press. He stands in front of you, head tilted and half his body is gone already. A piece of paper caught flame, burning away into nothing. In a second he'll disappear completely.

"I am Steel-and-Ember Elegia, Lord of Death and last king of Deheleshen."

The wind whips up into a moan for a moment and you raise a hand to shield your face from the spray, grunting as your eyes sting. When you lower it again he's vanished entirely. You wait. You don't have to wait long.

Walls of bloody red roar in from beyond the clouds, the sea stirred to some kind of fury, chewing each other, consuming each other and cresting high enough that you raise your hands and close your eyes. Hold your breath and duck as they smash into your slight frame and all sound vanishes from the world but the metallic keen of the ocean. Abruptly returning as they pass over you, leaving you coughing and gasping in their wake, only for the water to abruptly be pour back out towards the unseen horizon, a power that nearly knocks you over onto all fours. Force yourself back up; for once in your fucking life you will meet this head on.

There is a shadow forming against the hidden sky; billowing up, fanning out. Like a puppeteer silhouetted by the lantern-light, their outline dappled on the canvas-cloth. Rising and rising and rising until it looms leviathan-vast over you. Until it dwarfs you and your little slice of shoreline utterly, drowning you in the black. It's the kind of scale, the scope that sets the teeth on edge, that catches your stomach in a fist and squeezes until vertigo bubbles up in the back of your brain. Can you see the symmetry to it? See the design in it? The terrible suggestion of hunched shoulders the size of mountain slopes and green foothills. The limbs that split and fork like mangrove roots, plunging down into the deep; empty space and light shining between titan arms. The awful impression of boulevard broad skeins of muscle, sinews like a Shogunate highway, like the walls that caged your whole world.

How near is it? How far? You can't tell. There is no context, no point of comparison save yourself and what do you know? You're basically a ghost already.

A giant's hand settles some hundred meters away, on the very edge of your bubble. Skinless and flayed, grey concrete bones anchoring a thick web of muscle. It's the size of your village, easy, and the simple shockwave of displaced air is enough to blow your hair back and turn the world pink with mist and roiling waves. The sheer mass of it grinds down into the muck, knuckles jutting up from the water like seawalls, like barrier islands. The goliath arm it's attached to vanishing up into the mist, the crook of the elbow just barely visible. Another palm comes to rest a hundred meters on the other side. A third comes down on the beach and the ground shudders beneath you, rattling your jaws. A fourth farther out to sea. More. Surrounding you, hemming you in.

But you're not afraid are you? Because even through the clouds you see that crown, so much larger now, a molten halo on that impossible shadow, that inhuman shape. Because even through the clouds you see that crescent moon smile, viperous fangs gleaming and it's his smile.

You wonder again if you're being deceived again. If this isn't some final hurdle, some test of attachment and piety and faith. That in a moment the screen will be pulled away and you will be judged, consigned to filth and pollution for your sin. Damned forever for your presumption.

But how many Listeners have cleaned your face and held you as you wept? How many noble Dragons have seen the misery on your face and whispered kindness to you? What comfort have the gods of the City been to one who has no gods at all?

A final hand plunges through the mist; a closed fist, the mere motion of its passage sending skeins of sand and clumps of grit rasping over the dunes behind you. Fat tendrils of mist clinging to the wrist like bangles and bracelets. It hovers over you, this thing that could crush you so utterly, so trivially. You're in it's shelter but the rain might as well still be falling. It opens.

The thing falls and lands in the shallows a few scant feet from you. The vibration buzzing through your legs as it strikes and sticks, embedded in the mud. Canted at slight angle. It's only as big as you are so it couldn't be more than a mote of dust to the thing above. But still, even you, unschooled, virtually unlettered, you can feel its power.

Push yourself to a shaky standing position. Take a step forward, the churning current lapping against the tops of your thighs. Take another.

It's like a cracked concrete column, a pillar- a canister? A silo? Of clouded charcoal glass, a white bone lattice webbing over it. Pulsing, faintly throbbing, the swelling and receding visible. Crimson and cobalt tendrils like the channels of the heart, like your own veins and arteries, feather the inside, curl over the outside, like so much ivy and crawling creeper. Like strangler vines. Shifting, audibly creaking as they flex and slow-squeeze their precious treasure. Can you see the thing inside? The flickering, beating heart at the very core? You can can't you?

It is a red-edged wound in the world. A gravity smear, a circlet of shattered stars, a tear the exact color of Sol Invictus's ruined heart. It knows you're there. It is hungry. It is ready. It has been longing for this for longer than you can know. It is every shade of every nightmare you've ever had. The hue of every dream you've ever nurtured. It knows you.

It loves you.

Your nails brush the glass and the living bone and the blood vessels thicker than your wrist. You press your palm to it. The thing in the depths responds in kind, kindles itself brighter and brighter. Building and the edges howling even as it begins collapses in on itself. Coagulating into something obscene: accretion disks and arterial clots. It is the store-room fire and the thatched roof all ablaze. It is the cold ashes that remain. But there is no light, there is no light, there is no light; it does not shine, it only burns.

But you've burned before haven't you?

You feel the pillar fold, feel it twist upon itself and open itself to you and in the end the space between good man and Anathema isn't so very wide. Close your eyes and you can cross from one to the other with a single step.

Your name was Alexius.










Ash. Soot. Cinder. Splinters. Scream. Choking. Ash. Bodies. Scream.

Scream.

Scream.

The gutted shell of the storehouse shatters around you, the foundations exploding, charred timbers hurled out to crash through the scorched walls of surrounding structures. Vast drifts of grey-white and crackling orange twisting around you, fluttering, flaring into fresh flame as a column of purple-red sears skyward. Focused around you. Stemming from you.

Your name is Harrower of the Celestial Skein.

The army that helped murder you now stands on the battlements, enclosing you on every side. Fighting desperately against a foe you cannot see but already there is shouting, figures pointing, turning. You cannot escape them.

Good.

You are changing, you are mutable, you feel the best you have ever felt in your entire life and there is more here. More waiting. All you have to do is reach out and take it.
[ ] [Dusk] Incarnadine Reaper. All Deathknights can draw Essence from the lives of others and spilled blood is one of the most common mediums. But you. You have learned how to feed from multiple enemies at once in the heat of combat, rapidly fueling yourself in the process.
[ ] [Dusk] Shattering the World's Spine. You excel at close combat but mere "distance" will not keep them safe. Strike the ground and send shockwaves of razored bone ridges and visceral red blades rippling out. A focused line of destruction as devastating as any cataphract charge.
[ ] [Dusk] Crimson Chrysalis Strike. Men that you strike die. Some explosively so. Cuts and injuries tinged with this Charm's power scab over in seconds. Forming glassy, scarlet ribbons across the body that promptly ignite. Killing the unfortunate victim and wounding those nearby.